That's how long it took to turn Ryan's skeleton into something that looked like a house.
February bled into March, and March dragged into April. The days blurred together—a relentless grind of framing and wiring and drywall dust that coated everything, including the inside of my lungs. No sane contractor would have agreed to the pace. We did it anyway. We worked dawn to dusk, sometimes later, racing the calendar and the dwindling balance in the construction account.
The crew settled into a rhythm. Collins handled the rough framing with the kind of speed that came from youth and fearlessness. Frank and Walt tag-teamed the finish work, their combined years of experience evident in every cut.
But we didn't do it alone. Every Saturday and Sunday, the rest of the shop showed up—Jimmy, Carlos, and the younger guys who couldn't commit full-time but refused to let us fail. They’d roll in at sunrise, fueled by coffee and a sense of collective defiance, tackling the heavy lifts so the core crew could focus on the precision work. We brought in subs for the mechanicals—sparkies and plumbers who worked double shifts under the glowof work lights to get the rough-ins signed off. It was a chaotic, expensive sprint, but by mid-April, the 'bleeding wound' was finally starting to heal.
And, at the center of all this, Olivia.
She had become something I hadn't expected.
She'd started as the woman with the clipboard, managing invoices and permit applications from her folding table in the garage. But somewhere between February and April, she stopped being a spectator.
I'm not sure when it happened. Maybe it was the day she climbed the ladder to help Frank install a header beam, or the afternoon she spent on her knees laying subfloor while the rest of us framed out the loft. Maybe it was just the accumulation of small moments—her hands getting rougher, her questions getting sharper, the way she started moving through the site with the same unconscious efficiency as the rest of us.
By mid-April, she could read a tape measure faster than Collins. She knew the difference between a pneumatic framing nailer and a finish nailer. She'd learned to anticipate what we needed before we asked for it. Staging materials, calling suppliers, catching code violations before the inspector did… it didn’t matter what it was, Olivia could handle it.
The crew stopped treating her like Ryan's widow and started treating her like one of us.
Frank was the first to crack. I'd been up on a ladder, installing a window header, when I heard him bark across the site: "Olivia, hand me that level. The four-footer, not the two."
She'd tossed it to him without looking up from the cut list she was marking. He caught it, checked the bubble, and grunted his approval. That was it. She'd just... become part of the crew.
I should have been focused on the work. On the fact that we were burning through money faster than I'd projected, or that the drywall phase had taken two weeks longer than plannedbecause the mud wouldn't dry in the cold, damp air of early spring.
But I kept watching her.
I watched her pull her hair back into a ponytail every morning with the same unconscious efficiency. I watched her hands, once soft and pale, turn calloused and tan. I watched the way she'd started wearing her tool belt slung low on her hips, the weight of the hammer and tape measure as natural as breathing.
And I watched the way she stopped flinching every time someone said Ryan's name.
It was a gradual thing, like ice melting. In February, any mention of him would make her go still, her jaw tightening in that way that meant she was fighting to keep her composure. By March, she'd just nod and keep working. By April, she could talk about him without her voice going flat. She could say "Ryan designed this beam layout" or "Ryan wanted the fireplace here" like he was just another architect whose plans we were executing.
She was letting go.
And I was falling.
I didn't mean to. I'd told myself a thousand times that this was temporary—that once the house sold and the debt was cleared, we'd go our separate ways. She'd rebuild her life, and I'd go back to mine, and whatever this was would fade into the category of "complicated situations we survived together."
But then she'd laugh at something Collins said, or she'd look up at the cathedral ceiling with that expression of quiet pride, or she'd hand me a cup of coffee in the morning without a word, and I'd feel it again… that pull, that damn weight in my chest that had nothing to do with guilt or obligation.
It scared the hell out of me.
The windows arrived on a Tuesday in late April.
We'd been waiting on them for three weeks—custom orders, triple-pane, the kind of high-end glass that would make the house marketable to buyers with money. The delivery truck rolled in just after seven, and we spent the morning unloading them, stacking them carefully against the interior walls.
By noon, we had the first one mounted. It was a massive twelve-foot unit that framed the view of the hills. Collins and I muscled it into the rough opening, shimmying it level while Frank packed the gaps with spray foam. When we stepped back, the difference was immediate.
The house had been a shell for months, open to the wind and weather, protected only by plastic sheeting that snapped and tore. But with the first window in place, it became something else.
It became a home.
We worked through the afternoon, installing window after window. By four o'clock, the first floor was done. The light coming through the glass was different. Warmer, softer, filtered through real panes instead of translucent plastic.
I was on a ladder, caulking the exterior trim on the last window, when I heard tires on gravel.
Olivia's car.
